Three Poems by Steve Klepetar

 

Portrait: Girl in a Blue Skirt

 

She is a door left open in the weather,  

a blue note bent thin as a wire.  

Her skirt flickers like a small electric lake,  

and the street leans toward her to listen.

A crow wheels out of the margin of noon.  

Its shadow enters her mouth and sings.

She is neither arriving nor leaving,  

only translated by light.

Storefront mannequins shed their glass skins,  

step down quietly, and follow her reflection.  

Even the pavement begins to remember rain,  

though the sky has not yet decided.

Her hands hold a silence with antlers,  

a silence with teeth, a silence that blinks.  

At her feet, the day unbuttons itself,  

and the world slips through like a dark fish.

Portrait: Boy with a Wounded Cat

He stands in a room that remembers rain,  

holding a cat stitched poorly 

by afternoon light.  

Its breath comes in small, 

borrowed measures,  

as if the air were rationed 

by unseen hands.

He whispers soft syllables 

drifting like dust 

in a closed church. 

Outside, something drags 

its shadow across the yard,  

but neither of them turn to look.

The cat’s eye flickers, 

a broken lantern,  

and the boy feels the weight 

of unasked questions.  

He presses his ear to its fragile ribs, 

listening for the sound 

of whatever is leaving them both.

Portrait; Two Sisters at the Art Museum

They stand before a painting no one else studies,  

a bowl of pears dissolving into shadow.  

The older sister counts cracks in the varnish,  

while the younger watches a guard’s slow orbit.

They have not spoken in three rooms.  

Something about a borrowed sweater,  

or a secret folded into a notebook  

like a pressed moth no one names.

Light slips across their identical wrists,  

thin bones learning the grammar of distance.  

One leans closer, as if to confess to the pears,  

the other steps back, already elsewhere.

Their reflections tremble in the glass,

two versions of almost the same story.  

A docent coughs. Time rearranges itself.  

They leave together, not quite side by side.

Steve Klepetar lives in the Shire (Berkshire County, in Massachusetts, that is). His work has appeared widely and has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. He is the author of fourteen poetry collections, including Family Reunion and The Li Bo Poems.